"retirement is boring" is only true if the current way you spend your free time is boring. i love my free time and i know from experience that having more of it simply allows me to learn and achieve more of what i want. maybe these hobbies would become professional if they were full time, maybe not. people are different and spend their free time in different ways.
(wrt free time, i would say: stop procrastinating! i'm lucky, because i naturally prefer to work immediately and then be able to spend my free time exactly as i prefer, rather than wasting time and working under pressure near deadlines. if you can figure out how to trade your procrastination time for real pleasure, then you win both now and later.)
More accurately, "retirement is boring" is only true if your job is more interesting than your free time. I love my free time. I currently love my job more, mostly, and so I often end up doing work things in my free time. At this point, "retirement" would be a net loss even aside from the money issue. This will probably change once I've learned everything there is to learn at my job, but YMMV.
There are things that mostly depend on you, like studying hard in school or training for and finishing an Ironman.
There are other things where external conditions (like where you're located, whom you know, how wealthy you are, what your competitors are doing) are very strong factors and are hard to work around.
Well said. One of the most confident, motivated, well spoken people I've ever seen, I met at a bus station in Zambia. This guy, who I can honestly say would be far more successful than myself if he were to make it to America, had risen to pretty much the pinnacle of what he could achieve given the circumstances of his birth:
He was the most respected hustler at the biggest bus yard in Zambia.
But it's very hard to do in terms of knowing how to do it. Most people here on HN know what it takes to get good grades or work out, but even here on HN not everyone is good at networking, not everyone can relocate to SV (eg. because you have a family or don't get a Visa), not everyone can afford to repeatedle try again with a new company. Also, when I said "wealthy" I meant "how wealthy is your family", as in how big a risk can you afford to take.
Where I live (E.Europe) I find most tech entrepeneurs are from somewhat wealthy families (= they don't have to worry about getting a 9-5 job, but they're not driving around in sportcars), so they're motivated but get to take bigger risks, don't have to worry about making a steady income, and also receive free networking from their parents, who are usually also businessman.
You can still try to work around these problems, in fact I have tried to, but you're taking on very large risks which are hard to control. Eg. if you're supporting your startup with contract work because there's no VC money around, and your contracts dry up, then what. Or, if your competition, located in another part of the world gets VC money and speeds away in terms of hype (not even the product), then what.
How much do the punitive debt repayment, personal liability and bankruptcy laws cause a chilling effect on entrepreneurship in your country? The common wisdom is that America has more risk taking because of our permissive bankruptcy laws and limited liability that allow people to discharge onerous business debt, but I'm wondering if that is actually true.
You have to be really good for others to do it for you.
In general, people's attention is focused on themselves. It's pretty rare for someone to talk you up unless they were really impressed by you. That's why it counts for so much when they do.
I suspect (actually, I'm pretty sure of it) that self-promoters do better than the average person, and it's only when you're much, much better than average (multiple standard deviations away) that you can get away with letting your accomplishments speak for themselves.
>> (actually, I'm pretty sure of it) that self-promoters do better than the average person
This is certainly true. If you look at a group of well-known people, the percentage that put a lot of effort into self-promotion is much, much higher than in the general population.
In many cases self-promotion seems to be their main strength.
This is difficult to square with the evidence. Many good people, for any definition of good, are not talked about. Many people who are talked about have no externally verifiable accomplishment which would point to them being good, aside from being talked about.
I have a bit of the engineer skepticism about self-promotion, but to the extent that I have a positive reputation that continues to open doors for me, it is partially because I'm talented and largely because I have worked hard and effectively for years at marketing myself. (Only partially consciously at points. It turns out that helping people and writing well are both really effective methods of self-promotion.)
helping people is always a good thing, but the troubble with good writting is that there is no good way to get better. Once you have mastered spelling and grammar, it is very difficult to improv.
A better tactic may be to write tolerably and have someting interesting to say.
That's not true at all. There's wide variation on the quality of writers even if you restrict yourself only to those who can spell and use correct grammar. Things like word choice, omitting adverbs and filler, sentence length, organization into paragraphs, structure of the piece, transitions, use of formatting, and supporting details all make for noticeable differences in how easy it is to read.
Saying "there's no way to get better" is like saying "once you learn the syntax of Java, you know everything there is to know about programming." It just belies your ignorance of how much else there is to know.
I said there is no good way to get better, by which I mean a way that you can objectively measure whether what you are doing today is better than what you were doing yesterday and most crucially of all: what you need to improve.
You can do that with programming since each choice you make gives a tradeof in terms of speed, complexity, etc. I haven't seen a book with a similar set of concerns with regards to writing.
If you define "good" as "can be objectively measured", you've cut out most of the interesting problems. Data is a tool, not a crutch.
If you write UI software, how do you know that you're getting better? You can use A/B testing, sure; but how do you decide which metrics to use? Ultimately, it comes down to taste: you look at one possible approach, you look at the other, you give them both an honest appraisal, and then you say "I like the first version better."
It's the same thing with writing. Write a sentence. Now rewrite it, removing superfluous words or changing the phrasing or breaking it in two. Which one did you like better? What's different about it? That's how you improve.
As for their being no books - pish posh, there're plenty of books on improving your writing skills. The Elements of Fiction Writing is one such series. I've heard Steven King's On Writing is also quite good. The best way, however, is to sit down with an experienced writer and have them critique your work.
Failing that, you could always go look at Paul Graham's Etherpad recordings of his writing process and see what he does.
>> that you can objectively measure whether what you are doing today is better than what you were doing yesterday and most crucially of all: what you need to improve.
It is hard to judge your own work, The best way is to get a friend to do it.
Another approach it to re-read your writing and compare it to early work. Letting 6 months go by will allow you to re-read your work with fresh perspective. Compare to what you wrote 2 years ago.
The cheapest approach is to take a break for a little while, then come back and re-read what you just wrote. Is it well-organized? Is anything phrased awkwardly? Are there parts you can tighten up without losing anything?
Just taking the time to do this can make a huge difference in the quality of your writing.
It turns out that helping people and writing well are both really effective methods of self-promotion.
I think I do a lot to help others and I also write well. It hasn't resulted in much career-wise/self-promotion-wise. So I suspect it's a bit more complicated than that.
I'm really, really good at a few things. My experience is that this causes people to think I am a teller of tall tales. And, no, I haven't found that others do a lot of promoting me for me. I am still trying to figure out what would effectively promote my projects. Simply setting the bar really high isn't by itself getting there. (My personal situation is complicated, but, no my experience does not square with "if you are good enough, others will just do it for you".)
(Not entirely kidding. "Awesome" is a word that has been applied to me repeatedly by some folks but I find that other folks really just think I have a huge ego and am all talk. I have never found a direct way around this. It just takes time to prove stuff that others think is 'too good to be true'.)
"If you are any good, you do not need to talk yourself up"
I think it's more If you are any good, your work will do the talking for you. Its still upto you to promote your work.
Really tough lesson to learn, and especially so for women. Fred Wilson recently posted an interview of his wife on AVC.com. When asked about one piece of advice she would give female entrepreneurs, Joanne said something like, "Learn to stand on the table and say "I rock"." Great advice for all of us, I think!
> If you are any good, you do not need to talk yourself up, as others will do it for you
No. Do not depend on people to do this for you. I've made this mistake.
A few years ago I had a series of weak and bad managers; the review process where I work involves a "stack ranking" system where managers go to bat for you and people are ordered. (I know, it sucks. I don't have control over that, and aside from this I rather like where i work).
Weak manager = bad review. You get ranked low and a review is customized for that.
Depending on your environment, self promotion is survival. If you are in a tank with sharks, you do not want to be a tuna.
To be fair, what the comment may be saying is something entirely different: Many countries don't have a Fifth Amendment. You have to talk to the cops, or they will force you. Possibly by torture.
(Even in the USA, cops torturing people into talking is not just a routine staple of crime drama, but is also tragically common in real life.)
I'm pretty aware that in my country it is highly probable (but not for sure) for the police to get 'physical' (as the guy in the second video said), but I don't expect to get tortured in the way you see in movies. I still think the best course of action is to endure some mild abuse and display non-defiant, respectful behaviour and still refuse to answer any questions.
Bit from the second video: "How many parties need to know that a phone conversation in Virginia is being recorded? One. Me." (Coming from a policeman that tries to get confessions over the phone.)
A few weeks ago I decided that all common life lessons are only notable because they are unintuitive, go directly against millions of years of human development. Don't judge a book by its cover, don't count your chickens before they hatch, etc. I feel like all these phrases came about as condescending told-you-so's rather than actual meaningful guidelines.
I hate to be negative and there's some good advice here, but really a lot of this is just replacing old unresearched assumptions with newer pronouncements that are similarly without any reference. At best these are left un-sourced, at worst they seem to be based purely on personal experience. Yet most of these are or could be topics of unbias study. A few examples:
Buy a nice bed. Buy a very nice mattress and high-thread-count sheets. You will need to test out a variety of mattresses to find the one that fits you best but if you find the right one, it will greatly enhance the quality of your sleep, and subsequently, your waking life.
Why is it that more expensive mattresses = better sleep? Cite the evidence showing that high thread-count sheets = better sleep, which in tern laeds to improvements in waking life.
You can accomplish more if you work less and sleep more. Hypothetically a well-rested person working 55-hour work weeks can usually outperform a sleep-deprived person working 80-hour work weeks in terms of quality, all else equal (specifically for knowledge work).
Hypothetically this isn't true at all. Is there evidence to support this hypothesis or not? If not, this adds nothing to the debate.
You can pay the farmer, or you can pay the doctor. Prevention (i.e. good diet and food ingredients) is an order of magnitude cheaper than treatment (most age-related diseases are correlated with poor dietary choices).
This is trite and catch-all. What is good diet? There is no common agreement (see: high carb/high protein/high fat discussions). Show the evidence that this is 'an order of magnitude' cheaper than treatment. What are 'good ingredients'. You recommend free-range meats? Grass-fed beef? Locally produced? Define 'good'.
A cheap chair and mattress may end up costing you 10-20x in doctor's bills.
Says who? 10-20x seems pretty specific - what's the citation on that? A 'cheap' chair - so is price the only metric? Any $2000 chair is worth it and saves money on doctor's bills? Doesn't it matter how often i spend sitting? Could there not be cheap chairs that are actually better than many expensive ones? What's an 'expensive' mattress?
Spoken communication has a massive non-verbal component. Study body language and you'll be pretty shocked at how often peoples' spoken words contradict their telltale non-verbal cues.
Citation please. A lot of the 'non-verbal communication' stuff (read: NLP) is considered unscientific gumf.
Don't get me wrong, there's some great advice in here. But around half is stuff that can be scientifically demonstrated and just off-handedly saying something is invalid whilst proclaiming the opposite without providing any citations is counter-productive. It just encourages "common knowledge" of the same old wives tales and folklore that it itself is trying to counteract.
why is it that more expensive mattresses = better sleep? Cite the evidence showing that high thread-count sheets = better sleep, which in tern laeds to improvements in waking life.
Sample of one: Due to serious health issues, I got rid of my expensive mattress and high thread count sheets and now sleep on the floor with no bedding. I sleep way better these days and overall quality of life is dramatically better. :-P
Sample of two: within reasonable limits, the harder the surface, the better I sleep. Best sleep I have is usually on a $5 polyfoam mattress on the floor. Best chair for me: $10 exercise ball.
So maybe time to call the bluff of the fancy-mattress-chair-industrial complex :)
I think just further's the OP's point. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data." What you are saying is not unreasonable, but testimonials are the lowest from of evidence.
I'm sure you can find at least a few very convinced people to tell you sleeping on jagged rocks is the best decision they ever made. And they wouldn't be lying, but that doesn't mean I should expect the same results.
I think this quote is often used beyond its range of validity. There is value in pointing out counterexamples when someone presents a general theory that you think is false.
The take-home point for me was not "spend more money on a mattress" but to make sure I had a "good" one. For me a "good" mattress is one comfortable for me (my preferences happen to be similar to yours rather than the answerer).
Right, but it could be that what first appears uncomfortable may still give you the best nights sleep; perhaps your immediate 'comfort rating' is a poor indicator.
Lying on the hard floor isn't comfortable for me but quite possibly I may sleep better.
You would be surprised to find out how interesting it is to read a long discussion [1] on the physics of the ideal bed. And how hard the physics is considering how obvious the answer seems at first.
Essentially distribution of force and responsiveness in ability to mold to give a minimum amount of pressure per area of skin is what is key. A perfectly molded extremely hard surface would be very comfortable while you remained perfectly still. Soft tends to be better because it responds to changes in position more readily. But too soft doesn't actually allow a proper distribution of force so hard but yielding is ideal. Hard also resists movements less and since changing positions is another way the body counters excessive pressure, it is ideal for people who utilize this feature. For those who move more this is a better compromise. What is the best bed packs a lot of physical punch, it will lead you all the way from biology to quantum mechanics if you so chose.
"Physics" has no real relevance to my issue. Microbiology is the main issue (edit: plus chemistry). It's a long story. Short version: Doctors were all too happy to condemn me to death. I was all too happy to politely tell them to shove it. I'm currently off all drugs and healthier than I have ever been in my life.
Oh, spare us. Playing at Mr. Citation Needed is not a form of smartness and is in fact a pernicious sort of bias. If you are too afraid of being wrong, you'll miss out on the benefits of being right.
On the other hand there is a lot of gunk out there which everyone "knows to be right" which in fact isn't. Quite often a scientific test with documented results is not a bad thing to have.
The problem is that the "advice" might do more harm than good, even though good was intended.
Skin care is a prime example of this; people recommend what works for them, but these products will, de facto, not work for some.
This is something that goes against a lot of HN's start-up philosophy, so it might meet some more disagreement. A lot of the advice dispensed on HN are maxims - take them or leave them - and the same thing applies.
If you re-read my comment I explicitly say that there is some great information here. When people simply give advice based on their history - things like "use your money to live closer to work" is good advice. You don't need a citation for this; it's just someone's advice and it's good advice. "Perhaps you haven't considered the great benefits from using your money to cut down your commute time; you may reflect how negative the daily commute is" is an excellent suggestion.
However the specific advice I quoted, e.g. "Buy a more expensive bed", "eat 'good' food", is useless, potentially harmful advice without citation.
Already there are responses to my parent comment about how they found an in-expensive bed is actually preferrable. It would be infinitely more useful if someone actually discussed recent research in to different beds as advice. Anecdotal recommendations in this area are useless and ironically they propagate the same folklore of 'common wisdom' that this quora question specifically mentioned in the title: "advice... against common sense or wisdom".
What is good diet? There is no common agreement (see: high carb/high protein/high fat discussions).
There's no consensus on what kind of diet is good for losing weight, but there's much more consistent evidence on what a healthy diet is: high in fruits and vegetables, unprocessed grains, low in saturated fat, salt, and refined carbohydrates.
You're proving the original point, since there are lots who argue that a healthy diet is high in naturally saturated fat and low in unprocessed grains.
The Mayo recommends limiting saturated fats [1]. So does the American Heart Association [2]. Also the World Health Organization [3]. According to Wikipedia (I haven't checked the links here), Health Canada, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the UK Food Standards Agency, the Food and Drugs Board of Ghana, and 6 other national agencies recommend consuming less saturated fats [4].
I Googled a little bit for articles challenging this consensus, the most scientific seemed be [5]. It cites studies that show no negative effects of saturated fats. However, the only evidence for a positive impact is cross-country comparisons, which have many uncontrolled variables, and mechanistic explanations without epidemiological backing.
So, the argument against saturated fats is not unanimous, but I think it's fair to say that it's a consensus. As for a healthy diet being low in unprocessed grains, we'll have to leave that for another day.
Conversely, the only evidence for a negative impact is cross-country comparisons with many uncontrolled variables. And those studies show a high correlation with trans-fat and/or white sugar/white flour. But those studies are the eventual basis for the recommendations you listed.
If you want studies/references, Gary Taubes' work would be a good place to start. Good Calories/Bad Calories seems to be approximately 1/3 bibliography.
Firstly, this is an appeal to authority[1]. Just because someone is 'smart' doesn't mean tehy are any better it advising someone in an area where their speciality doesn't lie. A successful business-man discussing correct bedding choice or dietary recommendations.
Secondly, you are shifting the burden of proof.
Thirdly, I didn't say it wasn't interesting; if you read my comment I explicitly said large parts of the post were interesting and valuable.
Though I fundamentally agree with you, especially on the silly claims about body language/quantitative claims about money spent on chairs, beds etc., I think it's important to realise that, in life, we constantly have to make decisions and:-
* There simply isn't enough time to thoroughly research everything on a scientific basis, not to mention that a large number of decisions must be made on things for which there simply isn't any good scientific data.
* Many questions simply lie outside the scope of scientific investigation - science (at least for the time being - things will get interesting when we are better able to model the brain) cannot determine answers to a great many philosophical questions for one, and, perhaps more controversially, there are questions where the number of factors involved simply make make scientific investigation either impractical or irrelevant - for example, determining whether agile actually makes a difference to dev team performance, or whether one language is more productive than another (and I know we'd all like the answer to that one :-).
It is very hard to control for the vast number of factors in a human endeavour - I am certain this is something not simply limited to computing but in fact applicable to many engineering disciplines.
In summary - though anecdote is scientifically useless, it is sometimes all we have to go on to make a decision. Just don't talk about it like it's scientific.
I agree entirely. There's lots of great advice in the post. Many things are logistically very difficult to study, and in general, "happiness" is a tough variable to quantify.
Advice like "perhaps you could consider spending your money to live closer to work" doesn't require citation. Nor does "self-promotion works". I go to my peers and family and ask for advice on problems and decisions and I'm not looking for citations but their advice best on their life experience. In no way am I diminishing this.
However, A cheap chair and mattress may end up costing you 10-20x in doctor's bills. is purporting fact. It looks to the casual observer that this is backed by some study. Using numbers implies something has been measured. Yet there is no citation. This 'fact' may be read, repeated, regurgitated and enter in to folklore, when in fact likely this is someone just proffering their opinion.
This is actually harmful and just encourages the kind of "common sense or wisdom" that the original question was trying to avoid.
Yes and, perhaps not clearly, I said that in mentioning the silliness of being quantitive about it and in the summary remark - though maybe not putting enough emphasis on it - stating something as if it is scientific fact when it's just pulled out of your ass is not only misleading, it's bordering on plain evil. No better way to a. mislead and b. discredit science.
First nice =! expensive. It's a subjective term meant to allow you to find your own definition. The whole point is one you seem to be in need of (don't focus on "specs" or "definitives" and just find a bed and bedding that you love. If it is more expensive then it's money well spent.)
Re: farmer v doctor- again you're focusing on the "detail" of the advice and while totally missing the point. The point of that advice is that prevention (whatever you personally define as such) and taking care of your long-term health is a far better option than waiting until something breaks.
You seem to want this advice to offer the exact recipe for a better life. You expect it to contain the scientifically proven facts. Unfortunately that's not how good advice works. Good advice gives you perspective while leaving the details up to you.
<mild_snark>
Finally most of the advice deals with this thing called "joy". you'll find that scientifically speaking there is no agreed upon universally measurable "joy" metric. In lieu of science I recommend creating your own totally subjective definition of joy and applying it to as much of your life as possible. I have no facts to give you as to why this improves your life so you're going to have to trust me... But it does. Vastly.
</mild_snark>
And that is the big picture that each piece of advice is offering you.
"First nice =! expensive. It's a subjective term meant to allow you to find your own definition."
The words 'cheap' and 'expensive' appeared 6 times in the article. I guess cheap can be used metaphorically but generally they are used to describe specifically the cost of the item. So I'm really not clear what point you are making. At no point did I confuse the concepts of 'nice' and 'expensive'.
"The point of that advice is that prevention [...] and taking care of your long-term health is a far better option than waiting until something breaks."
No, the point made was that prevention is orders of magnitude cheaper. It's you that seems to be confusing cost with a more subjective 'better'.
As for your mild_snark remark, all I can say is you've clearly not read my comments in this thread.
The topic of the question was:
"life lessons [that] are unintuitive or go against common sense or wisdom"
'prevention is better than waiting until something breaks', 'spend money on a good bed', are these really unintuitive? Do they go against common-sense?
As a hypothetical example, I would consider a good response to this question would be a well-cited example of how in fact a really cheap bed made out cardboard in fact gave the best nights sleep, or how actually it's a lot cheaper to ignore diet and deal with it later.
Why is it that more expensive mattresses = better sleep?
My experience is that it's not about the cost of an individual chair, or mattress, or desk, or whatever. It's about the cost of the process. The ideal mattress for you, today, might only cost a few hundred bucks, but you may have to put half a dozen of those cheap mattresses to the test to find it. And then your needs might change, because people grow older, and you'll need a different cheap mattress.
Your needs are going to change from day to day or from year to year. So what you want from furniture that's built to last is: Adjustability (you can change the height, the tension, or the angle without sacrificing structural soundness or necessary rigidity) and/or flexibility (the furniture is suitable for a wide range of postures and uses; a classic example is memory foam, which slowly adjusts itself to you). Not to mention: Portability and resale value, because you'll be auditioning a lot of stuff.
Consider desks, for example. At any given moment in my life, including this one, I could take my computer desk and replace it with a strategically stacked pile of cheap cardboard boxes. And, indeed, when I get a crazy new idea for a room arrangement (standing desks!) I tend to prototype it with cardboard boxes. But: The cardboard boxes are risky; they tend to fall apart over time, or fail very suddenly at moments of high stress. They also have poor structural characteristics; typing on a platform built out of cardboard, for example, can be quite unsatisfying, because it is squishy. And most importantly, the cardboard boxes don't adjust well at all. To change the height or position of my monitor or keyboard I have to find other boxes, or take everything apart and restack. Ergonomics is a game of inches. The ability to easily adjust something by an inch one way or the other is very valuable, and you are going to pay for that, either by buying something adjustable, or by auditioning two or three versions of everything, or by spending a lot of time jury-rigging things.
What is it with the mattresses? I'm only 33 but I've slept on pretty much any surface that's nominally softer than a floorboard and I've generally slept well. Can the mattress really make the difference if you have sleeping problems?
Yes? If you pay any attention at all to anecdotal reports, it very obviously makes a big difference for a lot of people. Anecdotal reports are what the OP is railing against though, I guess.
I agree with you except on the point of body language. It doesn't have to be mind reading, neuro-linguistic programming magic. Simple things like paying attention to tone and volume, position of limbs and posture, eye movement and facial expression will tell you a lot more than simple words. Even clothes and how a person uses words (length, timing and vocabulary) will be a hint. Control of this is what separates the "wooden" actors from the top actrosses. Profilers and poker players leverage this too. It draws from empathy and you basically trying to perform a statistical inference from the set of features in front of you to guess with high probability the true internal state and mood.
A lot of people have tells too, default motions you do when you are not comfortable. I am trying to unprogram mine.
Just to clarify, my only 'point' on body language was that writing "Study body language and you'll be pretty shocked at how often peoples' spoken words contradict their telltale non-verbal cues." un-sourced is unhelpful and doesn't answer the question.
I wasn't stating that there was not scientific basis behind the study of body language; only that if you are going to claim it, I would like to see it backed up with some science.
---
However if you like to discuss the specifics I think it's a very interesting topic. Certainly there are some cues that can be garnered from the study of body language, although from everything I've read the role it can play is over-stated.
Interesting choice of examples: I'm a professional poker player and the role of live 'tells' is generally assumed by non-player playing populace to be much more important than reality[1]. Everything I've read recently about criminal profiling has thrown it in to a negative light and questioned it's validity[2].
A lot of NLP has entered in to 'commonly held beliefs' or is now considered 'intuitive'. When someone is lying they look to the left to access the right hemisphere; this type of hand shake implies dominance; all that jazz. This stuff is easy to test clinically and there is just not the evidence in support[3]. As you brought up eye movement, one study sourced in the Wikipedia article shown no evidence of "a person's preferred sensory mode of thinking can be revealed by observing eye movement cues"
This stuff is very easy to believe and is certainly 'intuitive'. But to my knowledge it has no scientific basis; but I'm certainly interested to read anything that shows otherwise.
It's very frustrating to deal with people who apply NLP or lay-CBT on a regular basis. Especially when you are trying to have a rational conversation and they are wasting time trying to "learn about sub-modalities" or apply auditory anchors to things like acceptance or rejectance.
One person I work with occasionally very clearly thinks of himself as talented in mind control by applying these things. However, from the outside it's very apparent that they have simply poisoned his perspective to make him believe he is being successful.
In short, I wish people would stop wasting time propagating pseudoscience.
I am not arguing with you since I agree. I am just saying you are going after the extreme and ignoring the much more useful and mundane aspects to non-verbal communication. All I am saying is that there are non-verbal components when two or more people are communicating and it is useful to pay attention to it. Being aware of these allow you to be sensitive to the emotional undertones, something whose usefulness should not be discounted. Basically empathizing. And I too think NLP or stuff like - if someone looks left twice while blinking their nose - is complete garbage.
I am not defending extremes like NLP or the far out profiling where you try to get in the mind of someone. By profiling - maybe I mislabelled it - I mean basic stuff that every police officer is trained to look for as indicators of nervousness or over defensiveness (indicators but not conclusive proof - a person might just be easily jarred). Certainly bluffing and reading tells are overstated but that does not mean they are useless and can't be used to a good level by expert players (as an aside making a bot that plays good poker is my hobby so I agree on the power of finding patterns in data as key and those who use holdem manager can also attest). Also by tells I mean little things that your mother or S.O. will know about you when you are thinking, nervous, excited etc.
Consider, if someone you know is yelling with an angry tone can you tell if they are pretending to be angry or are really angry with good confidence? The same sentence read differently can have a world of difference. When you see someone can you have a good idea if they are confident? Stuff like downward gaze, slouched shoulders, shaky voice are the signals I speak of, any one of which may not be useful but taken together push you firmly into a certain distribution. You control this and you can have an influence on how people perceive you. No need to seek to NLP nonsense.
With respect to the high thread count thing - I recently went and bought some (previous sheets basically worn out) and I wouldn't say that it improves my sleep.
What it does do though, is it feels like a luxury good.
It is this mental thing/process of giving yourself a treat, or treating yourself like 'royalty' that gives you a little boost. And it didn't cost all that much either.
Similarly, with the last pairs of jeans that I bought, I paid to have the length adjusted. Previously I'd just rolled up the cuffs(?) and they get a bit daggy. Despite the adjustment costing almost as much as the jeans did, my guilty secret is that I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from looking down and seeing perfect length jeans.
Treat yourself, you're worth it, and nobody else will do it for you...
The sheets you bought may feel like a luxury good, but that's not necessarily correlated with the thread count.
Thread count is much less important than the quality of the cotton/fiber and the quality of the weaving. Even shops that sell sheets admit to this, saying that thread count is a metric, but is primarily a marketing tool.
> > You can accomplish more if you work less and sleep more. Hypothetically a well-rested person working 55-hour work weeks can usually outperform a sleep-deprived person working 80-hour work weeks in terms of quality, all else equal (specifically for knowledge work).
You're right: the research shows that a 35 hour workweek is ideal for knowledge workers. This has been repeatedly confirmed in various studies. See PeopleWare or Slack, both by DeMarco.
> > Spoken communication has a massive non-verbal component. Study body language and you'll be pretty shocked at how often peoples' spoken words contradict their telltale non-verbal cues.
> Citation please. A lot of the 'non-verbal communication' stuff (read: NLP) is considered unscientific gumf.
Objecting to this is simply inane. NLP may be bunk, but if you truly believe that what people mean === what they say, I feel sorry for you.
So you may downvote me, but i never 'objected to it', I never said "if you truly believe that what people mean === what they say". Suggesting I did is missing the entire point of my post. It's not about whether you agree with something or not, it's that answering a question specifically asking for 'something un-intuitive or not common wisdom' with banal un-cited generalities is quite worthless.
I guess you will have to continue to feel sorry for me.
I may have missed the point, but if so, so did a lot of other people. If you meant to say "this is true but trivial", the phrase "unscientific gumf" was a poor choice.
I gave you some citations for your other question. I'll assume you meant to thank me for clarifying the matter and just forgot.
It's like we are talking about two entirely different subjects. Let me state it as clearly as I can:
- I was making absolutely no comment about whether something is true or not.
- I'm not saying that what was written was incorrect. And I'm not saying "this is true but trivial". Again, I'm making absolutely zero comment about whether what was said was accurate.
- My point was, if you are going to answer a question asking for advice that's 'un-intuitive or not common knowledge', making over-simplified, bland recommendations on certain subjects without citation does not answer the question and actually makes things worse.
- When I said things like "where's the citation?", I wasn't actually asking for HN posters to respond to back it up. I'm not strongly opposed to, say, the reading of body language. (although it's certainly interesting to go off on a tangent and discuss some specific points - I've commented on this topic below in the discussion).
- Instead I was using a rhetorical device to demonstrate that the lack of clarification and citation just further spreads unscientific 'intuitive' folklore.
That people are actually providing citations to something and supporting a point actually supports my argument, do you see?
If you now take this understanding and re-read your first response, you can see the whole "well I feel sorry for you" thing just doesn't jive at at all to this sub-thread of discussion.
It's like we are talking about two entirely different subjects.
Story of my marriage. Some folks just have very incompatible communication styles. At such times, more clarification often just muddies the water more. I hope that is not the case here.
I would say on the diet/food thing, learning to cook properly for myself was one of the best choices I've made. Once you know how to cook you can safely ignore fad diets and you'll intuitively understand how to eat well, because you'll see exactly what goes into everything you eat.
Happiness = Outcome - Expectations. The key to enjoying life is keeping expectations low to the degree that you're always pleasantly surprised.
I find this a bad advice due to many different reasons. First and foremost, startups must have high expectations in order to, well, start up. People would never, ever create a company assuming it would go straight to hell after six months.
What also bothers me with this statement is that, by keeping expectations low, you would probably not work as much as you would if you had higher expectations.
As a final note, I have always kept my expectations very, very high. I always aim for A's at university. Yet, I do not feel less happy than the average Joe, even though I sometimes get a B or a C.
You don't start a company to become happy, and most young entrepreneurs have to work at it for years until they get ROI, so if they went into it with high initial expectations, they're almost guaranteed to burn out before reaching their goals.
Speaking of goals, you're confusing them with expectations. Having high goals and low expectations is generally the most potent mix to ensure that you're working hard. If you're working hard for an exam, but expect you'll only get a B, getting that A makes you happy. If you instead expect the A, and only get a B, you'll be unhappy and discouraged. We all know about that one star student who cried because they got "only a B".
I think you are mistaking "expectations" and "ambitions".
by keeping expectations low, you would probably not work as much as you would if you had higher expectations.
I think the opposite is true-- there are many startups that have failed because they expected the traffic to be there when they launched, because they expected the world to sit up and take notice, instead of realizing that there was a lot of hard work they had to do to get it. Lower expectations, in this case, leads to harder work (and a higher likelihood of success.)
In the past year or two, I have learned my greatest life lesson. As a lifelong high achiever, it was extremely counter-intuitive yet it was right in front of me all along. First, a little background...
In the past couple of years:
- My father died.
- My aunt (and best friend) died.
- My cousin (who was really like my brother) died.
- My 19 year old cat died.
- We had our first ever family reunion.
- My mother's dimentia has turned her back into a child.
Sure we all have great memories and are busy working at building even better futures, but ultimately it all boils down to:
All we have is now.
My pets have been trying to teach me this for years, if only I had listened. And now my mother is teaching me. They don't really remember yesterday. They don't care about tomorrow. But they really care about the moment. Intensely.
I have had to really slow down and let this sink in. When I visit my mother in her nursing home, we have a great time laughing, talking, visiting others, and of course, playing Jeopardy. We can't have the conversations we used to, so we just have new experiences, one time only, in the moment, and only for those who are there. We never talk about the past and she simply doesn't understand, "I'll see you tomorrow."
I haven't stopped building my future, but I no longer sacrifice the present in order to get there. I have learned that the process must be as enjoyable as the outcome. After all, the process is "now" and the outcome is just an instant in time.
It may sound cliche, but everyone should take inventory of all the good stuff in their lives (especially other people) and make the most of it now. You'll be surprised how quickly it'll be gone. Don't wait half your life to learn my most valuable counter-intuitive lesson.
It does sound cliché. And, respectfully, I think it's just as wrong [Edit: not wrong, but maybe shortsighted. Then again, if what I say in the following paragraphs doesn't change your view in the slightest, then more power to you: my view isn't the absolute. Do what you think is "right", whatever right might be.] as most clichés tend to be.
We have now, certainly, and now is amazing. But we have the past, too; at least for a while (dementia and all sorts of other things can rob us of the past). We have the future, too (though we can be robbed of that).
I live for all three. The past is where I draw from to inform my present actions; the present is where I enjoy myself and prepare for the future; the future is where we're all heading.
If I lived for the now, I wouldn't be going to college. I wouldn't be planning to study for a PhD in Neuroscience and researching assistive brain/spine implants. I wouldn't study programming languages and designs. I wouldn't be reading The Intelligent Investor. In fact, if you lived for the now, you'd probably be living in a soma-induced haze à la Huxley's Brave New World: it'd be the optimal choice, in fact. Pure neurochemical bliss.
The argument that you should live for now because you could be dead at any second is obscene, to me: it's more likely that you live than you die, and you're likely to be consistently happier now and in the future if you act like you'll be alive in the future. Evidence: planning for retirement. Seriously.
So live for yourself, sure, but live for all of yourself. Think of yourself as a smudge on a timeline: not in one place, not just in the past, not just in the future. Optimize the smudge.
When I look at people who seem to have lived long, vibrant lives, people such as Frank Lloyd Wright or Georgia O'Keeffe, I see people who acted as if they expected to live forever.
What stands out as a key difference between the happy and the unhappy is the belief that good, interesting, exiting things are ahead. Hell, more than half the fun of a vacation is the expectation of the fun you're going to have. (See also: certain beliefs in an afterlife.)
It pains me, as I get older, to see some of my friends and family shift from being upbeat and energetic, folks who made plans for the future, to dour and nostalgic, as if everything good that might ever happen to them has already passed.
Yes, we have past, present, and future. But you can't change past: it's gone so in the end it's not much to live for. You can't live for future either: you can just project now into something you think would be a good future. Thus, even planning for future happens now. It is now when anything happens and where any choices are made. Past and future are important and useful, but they only exist as concepts in your mind. You can't live future or past and while trying to do so can be soothing it will never get you anywhere.
In my humble opinion, it is foolish to underestimate the special position of now.
I can't deny the sound logic of your first statement. (see: tautology) Reasons include anecdotes, cuteness of the sentiment, and others. If you want to defend it, do. Don't strawman my arguments, though.
You live all of the future and the past. They all happen. You're mostly arguing semantics about the future, and you're ignoring the past almost entirely. My reasons for their importance stand, unaddressed.
I think one of the key words here that the OP didn't use was "for." I.e. he never said "I live for the present."
Rather, I think the word he was going for (correct me if I'm wrong) was "in." I.e. "Live in the present moment." Don't live in the past, don't live in the future, etc...
And that to truly live in the present moment, you have to take the wisdom of the past, and consider the weight your actions will hold in the future, but ultimately all you have is now. So I don't think what you said goes against what the OP said, it just highlights a different aspect. The past was lived, the future will be lived, but your decisions will be most important when they happen. You're not living if you're stuck in the past or displacing the present for some hazy future (a young investment banker working 100 hours a week for...).
Also, there are "present" qualities in all the examples you gave. Assistive brain/spine implants improves the present moment living conditions of other humans. We can use programming and the skills we have to build tools that help people better live their lives.
Also, things like love and other people are strongest in the present moment. Ultimately we likely invest and we study because so that we can make ourselves happy or search outside of ourselves, but a lot of times it's a lot closer (both physically and temporally) than we might think.
"If I lived for the now, I wouldn't be going to college. I wouldn't be planning to study for a PhD in Neuroscience and researching assistive brain/spine implants. I wouldn't study programming languages and designs. I wouldn't be reading The Intelligent Investor. In fact, if you lived for the now, you'd probably be living in a soma-induced haze à la Huxley's Brave New World: it'd be the optimal choice, in fact. Pure neurochemical bliss."
Living for the now doesn't mean being a dopamine junkie.
I went to college knowing that it was basically useless for what I wanted to do with my life. I went because it was time - all the adults around me said that I'd be missing out on an awesome experience if I didn't, and while I was a little skeptical, I figured I'd give it a try. That, and the economy was about to enter the shitter (it was 2001), and the company I was working at was about to lay off 40% of its workforce.
I majored in physics because I liked the feeling of sitting out on my roof with sunshine on my face (yeah, New England, it didn't last very long), textbook in my lap, working on really hard math problems. As it turned out, I didn't like it enough to stick with it. I then majored in computer science because I had found out that I liked it enough to spend my weekends working on compilers and my late nights reading up on programming language design. At the time I did those, I was a physics major, and they were completely irrelevant to anything that might possibly advance my degree or career. But they were fun.
I read The Intelligent Investor because I'd just started working at a financial software startup, had an hour long commute, and figured it might be more fun to figure out what I'd just gotten myself into rather than stare at the silent faces on the train. As it turned out, after reading The Intelligent Investor I didn't much like what I'd gotten myself into at all, which is why I'm not in finance now.
In one of Paul Graham's essays, he says that you can tell an adult from a child because an adult will tend to "lean into" challenges, accepting them as part of who they are instead of shrinking back from them. There's nothing that prevents you from building the habit of leaning into challenges into your daily identity. It doesn't particularly matter what those challenges are, it matters that you attack them. If you build this habit, you'll usually do fairly well even if you don't make a master plan for your life. Heck, you'll probably do better than people who do create a master plan, because life has a way of biting you in the ass and tearing your plans to shreds.
The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge. Someone who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance. If an adult says "that's a stupid idea," a kid will either crawl away with his tail between his legs, or rebel. But rebelling presumes inferiority as much as submission. The adult response to "that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in the eye and say "Really? Why do you think so?"
Something quite similar happened to me few years ago and I ended up with a very scary case of dysautonomia. Luckly it only lasted for couple month, but in this rather short period of time my whole perspective on live changed. It was only then when I truly started to appreciate the saying "Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it is called the present."
I'm convinced that being 100% present, "in the moment" for as many moments as possible is the real key to happiness. It's where the magic happens, in terms of productivity, relationships, learning, creativity... but BOY is it challenging to live that way every day!
There's a class of situations where the more you want something, the less likely you are to get it.
Desperation puts you at a disadvantage when you're looking for a mate or a job. People who can fake disinterest have the advantage over those with genuine neediness.
Yet, I would think that honesty and sincerity are key attributes of mates and employees.
Absolutely true. Maybe I'm mincing words but there is a corollary here too. There is a class of situations where the harder you try, the bigger the disadvantage you have. This can be hard for workaholic types to understand.
Class A (Effort correlates with results) = Work, school, etc.
Class B (Ease correlates with results) = Socializing, dating, etc.
Have as many kids as you can. Only they can give you the happiest and saddest moments of your life. And to better understand life, you need to know and go both extremes. Every smile is a hug to your heart, every tear is a kick to your soul. At the end of the journey, they will be the real treasure of your existence.
"Money CAN buy happiness", have a child and suddenly the value of having money goes up a hundred fold. The desire to make lots of money is not always based on greed!
I just had a daughter, and experienced the opposite. We're beyond the point of financial sufficiency, and I could make a lot more money if I chose to work more.
What I really want is more time every day to spend with her AND get work done.
I had a child almost 2 years ago now, and the value of money didn't change much. The value of time underwent some volcanic upheavals, on the other hand.
There's an awful lot of crap that modern parents buy for their babies that's actually totally irrelevant to what the baby needs to do well (plus it's crazy expensive -- there's a massive "baby tax" -- where everything for babies is extra pricey unless you buy cheap-o brand -- that's kinda like the "wedding tax"). But babies don't need their own rooms, furniture, etc. etc. etc. -- they really couldn't care less about having all of this stuff of their own. They want their parents, and they want to do what their parents do.
But their parents are busy working harder so they can pay for the furniture, fancy "genius baby" toys, and fake baby versions of all of the things adults use, when the kid is just dying to use the things the parents already have, and interact with the parents themselves in surprisingly sophisticated ways (if the parents let it happen, that is).
Don't even get me started on baby food (hint: eat healthy, breastfeed, and when the kid starts wanting solid foods just leave out the salt and amazingly they pick up on how to chew right away!).
Having a kid isn't expensive at all -- monetarily -- unless you get suckered by the industry. (Note: Unless you need to pay serious money for schooling; then it will be very expensive further down the line...).
But in terms of time... well, everything changes. We're doing better & better at integrating her into our lives (rather than "now I'm watching the baby so everything else stops), but I'm a developer. There's no good way to involve a 2-year-old in writing code, so while the laundry may be done and the dishes washed, I tend to work a lot at night.....
There is an inverse relationship between the extent to which someone labels themself as an authority and the extent to which they actually are an authority.
Corollary: Be particularly wary of medical "experts".
Second, and self-referential, corollary: Be particularly wary of "bitter" people and comments.
That there was a market for expired lightbulbs in the Soviet Union because working ones were hard to source.
People would bring the expired ones to work and swap them for working ones.
That thread points out a huge problem with the quora format - ideally people could vote up suggestions on a per-item basis, so that the community could collectively produce the best list of items.
Instead people produce long-winded all-encompassing content-duplicating posts, so we end up with a jumbled mess of data.
Generally, in most companies you have as much authority as you dare. The best way to get promoted is to just start doing the job you want to have and then have your title changed later. The idea that the organization and leadership of a company flows in exactly the manner the org chart specifies is a complete and utter fallacy. In reality, in most companies there is a lot of leadership coming from unexpected places, especially at a tech. company. If you sit back and wait for authority to be given to you that'll almost never happen, if you start spearheading worthwhile initiatives and start being an advocate for useful change, you'll get that authority in practice before you get it officially.
That can lead to a lot of inefficiency and friction, and people ditching their jobs for the jobs they'd like to do.
How do I know? At my current company, the IT department currently has no formal boss. So a few ambitious people decided they'd rather not do the boring programming work, and take advantage of the void. But they don't feel like being called to task. The current climate is far from ideal, and there's a lot of backstabbing going on, and if you feel responsible (for maintaining the invisible legacy systems for example), you lose to the ambitious guys.
On the plus side, I'm learning a lot about social dynamics :) . I've given up on advancing here, but the experience will be useful.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] thread(wrt free time, i would say: stop procrastinating! i'm lucky, because i naturally prefer to work immediately and then be able to spend my free time exactly as i prefer, rather than wasting time and working under pressure near deadlines. if you can figure out how to trade your procrastination time for real pleasure, then you win both now and later.)
I believe in this very strongly.
There are other things where external conditions (like where you're located, whom you know, how wealthy you are, what your competitors are doing) are very strong factors and are hard to work around.
He was the most respected hustler at the biggest bus yard in Zambia.
Where I live (E.Europe) I find most tech entrepeneurs are from somewhat wealthy families (= they don't have to worry about getting a 9-5 job, but they're not driving around in sportcars), so they're motivated but get to take bigger risks, don't have to worry about making a steady income, and also receive free networking from their parents, who are usually also businessman.
You can still try to work around these problems, in fact I have tried to, but you're taking on very large risks which are hard to control. Eg. if you're supporting your startup with contract work because there's no VC money around, and your contracts dry up, then what. Or, if your competition, located in another part of the world gets VC money and speeds away in terms of hype (not even the product), then what.
In general, people's attention is focused on themselves. It's pretty rare for someone to talk you up unless they were really impressed by you. That's why it counts for so much when they do.
I suspect (actually, I'm pretty sure of it) that self-promoters do better than the average person, and it's only when you're much, much better than average (multiple standard deviations away) that you can get away with letting your accomplishments speak for themselves.
In many cases self-promotion seems to be their main strength.
I have a bit of the engineer skepticism about self-promotion, but to the extent that I have a positive reputation that continues to open doors for me, it is partially because I'm talented and largely because I have worked hard and effectively for years at marketing myself. (Only partially consciously at points. It turns out that helping people and writing well are both really effective methods of self-promotion.)
A better tactic may be to write tolerably and have someting interesting to say.
Saying "there's no way to get better" is like saying "once you learn the syntax of Java, you know everything there is to know about programming." It just belies your ignorance of how much else there is to know.
You can do that with programming since each choice you make gives a tradeof in terms of speed, complexity, etc. I haven't seen a book with a similar set of concerns with regards to writing.
If you write UI software, how do you know that you're getting better? You can use A/B testing, sure; but how do you decide which metrics to use? Ultimately, it comes down to taste: you look at one possible approach, you look at the other, you give them both an honest appraisal, and then you say "I like the first version better."
It's the same thing with writing. Write a sentence. Now rewrite it, removing superfluous words or changing the phrasing or breaking it in two. Which one did you like better? What's different about it? That's how you improve.
As for their being no books - pish posh, there're plenty of books on improving your writing skills. The Elements of Fiction Writing is one such series. I've heard Steven King's On Writing is also quite good. The best way, however, is to sit down with an experienced writer and have them critique your work.
Failing that, you could always go look at Paul Graham's Etherpad recordings of his writing process and see what he does.
Another approach it to re-read your writing and compare it to early work. Letting 6 months go by will allow you to re-read your work with fresh perspective. Compare to what you wrote 2 years ago.
Just taking the time to do this can make a huge difference in the quality of your writing.
I think I do a lot to help others and I also write well. It hasn't resulted in much career-wise/self-promotion-wise. So I suspect it's a bit more complicated than that.
(Not entirely kidding. "Awesome" is a word that has been applied to me repeatedly by some folks but I find that other folks really just think I have a huge ego and am all talk. I have never found a direct way around this. It just takes time to prove stuff that others think is 'too good to be true'.)
No. Do not depend on people to do this for you. I've made this mistake.
A few years ago I had a series of weak and bad managers; the review process where I work involves a "stack ranking" system where managers go to bat for you and people are ordered. (I know, it sucks. I don't have control over that, and aside from this I rather like where i work).
Weak manager = bad review. You get ranked low and a review is customized for that.
Depending on your environment, self promotion is survival. If you are in a tank with sharks, you do not want to be a tuna.
(Even in the USA, cops torturing people into talking is not just a routine staple of crime drama, but is also tragically common in real life.)
But, never hurts to remain aware that part of their job is to help turn arrests into convictions. Think of it as a customer conversion metric.
Nothing wrong with not talking to them without the advice of an attorney.
Buy a nice bed. Buy a very nice mattress and high-thread-count sheets. You will need to test out a variety of mattresses to find the one that fits you best but if you find the right one, it will greatly enhance the quality of your sleep, and subsequently, your waking life.
Why is it that more expensive mattresses = better sleep? Cite the evidence showing that high thread-count sheets = better sleep, which in tern laeds to improvements in waking life.
You can accomplish more if you work less and sleep more. Hypothetically a well-rested person working 55-hour work weeks can usually outperform a sleep-deprived person working 80-hour work weeks in terms of quality, all else equal (specifically for knowledge work).
Hypothetically this isn't true at all. Is there evidence to support this hypothesis or not? If not, this adds nothing to the debate.
You can pay the farmer, or you can pay the doctor. Prevention (i.e. good diet and food ingredients) is an order of magnitude cheaper than treatment (most age-related diseases are correlated with poor dietary choices).
This is trite and catch-all. What is good diet? There is no common agreement (see: high carb/high protein/high fat discussions). Show the evidence that this is 'an order of magnitude' cheaper than treatment. What are 'good ingredients'. You recommend free-range meats? Grass-fed beef? Locally produced? Define 'good'.
A cheap chair and mattress may end up costing you 10-20x in doctor's bills.
Says who? 10-20x seems pretty specific - what's the citation on that? A 'cheap' chair - so is price the only metric? Any $2000 chair is worth it and saves money on doctor's bills? Doesn't it matter how often i spend sitting? Could there not be cheap chairs that are actually better than many expensive ones? What's an 'expensive' mattress?
Spoken communication has a massive non-verbal component. Study body language and you'll be pretty shocked at how often peoples' spoken words contradict their telltale non-verbal cues.
Citation please. A lot of the 'non-verbal communication' stuff (read: NLP) is considered unscientific gumf.
Don't get me wrong, there's some great advice in here. But around half is stuff that can be scientifically demonstrated and just off-handedly saying something is invalid whilst proclaiming the opposite without providing any citations is counter-productive. It just encourages "common knowledge" of the same old wives tales and folklore that it itself is trying to counteract.
Sample of one: Due to serious health issues, I got rid of my expensive mattress and high thread count sheets and now sleep on the floor with no bedding. I sleep way better these days and overall quality of life is dramatically better. :-P
So maybe time to call the bluff of the fancy-mattress-chair-industrial complex :)
I'm sure you can find at least a few very convinced people to tell you sleeping on jagged rocks is the best decision they ever made. And they wouldn't be lying, but that doesn't mean I should expect the same results.
Lying on the hard floor isn't comfortable for me but quite possibly I may sleep better.
Essentially distribution of force and responsiveness in ability to mold to give a minimum amount of pressure per area of skin is what is key. A perfectly molded extremely hard surface would be very comfortable while you remained perfectly still. Soft tends to be better because it responds to changes in position more readily. But too soft doesn't actually allow a proper distribution of force so hard but yielding is ideal. Hard also resists movements less and since changing positions is another way the body counters excessive pressure, it is ideal for people who utilize this feature. For those who move more this is a better compromise. What is the best bed packs a lot of physical punch, it will lead you all the way from biology to quantum mechanics if you so chose.
[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=464
Peace.
Skin care is a prime example of this; people recommend what works for them, but these products will, de facto, not work for some.
This is something that goes against a lot of HN's start-up philosophy, so it might meet some more disagreement. A lot of the advice dispensed on HN are maxims - take them or leave them - and the same thing applies.
If you re-read my comment I explicitly say that there is some great information here. When people simply give advice based on their history - things like "use your money to live closer to work" is good advice. You don't need a citation for this; it's just someone's advice and it's good advice. "Perhaps you haven't considered the great benefits from using your money to cut down your commute time; you may reflect how negative the daily commute is" is an excellent suggestion.
However the specific advice I quoted, e.g. "Buy a more expensive bed", "eat 'good' food", is useless, potentially harmful advice without citation.
Already there are responses to my parent comment about how they found an in-expensive bed is actually preferrable. It would be infinitely more useful if someone actually discussed recent research in to different beds as advice. Anecdotal recommendations in this area are useless and ironically they propagate the same folklore of 'common wisdom' that this quora question specifically mentioned in the title: "advice... against common sense or wisdom".
There's no consensus on what kind of diet is good for losing weight, but there's much more consistent evidence on what a healthy diet is: high in fruits and vegetables, unprocessed grains, low in saturated fat, salt, and refined carbohydrates.
I Googled a little bit for articles challenging this consensus, the most scientific seemed be [5]. It cites studies that show no negative effects of saturated fats. However, the only evidence for a positive impact is cross-country comparisons, which have many uncontrolled variables, and mechanistic explanations without epidemiological backing.
So, the argument against saturated fats is not unanimous, but I think it's fair to say that it's a consensus. As for a healthy diet being low in unprocessed grains, we'll have to leave that for another day.
[1] http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/fat/NU00262
[2] http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/GettingHealthy/FatsAndOils/Fat...
[3] http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/diet/en/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Dietary_recommend...
[5] http://www.health-report.co.uk/saturated_fats_health_benefit...
EDIT: fixed linebreaks
If you want studies/references, Gary Taubes' work would be a good place to start. Good Calories/Bad Calories seems to be approximately 1/3 bibliography.
Secondly, you are shifting the burden of proof.
Thirdly, I didn't say it wasn't interesting; if you read my comment I explicitly said large parts of the post were interesting and valuable.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
* There simply isn't enough time to thoroughly research everything on a scientific basis, not to mention that a large number of decisions must be made on things for which there simply isn't any good scientific data.
* Many questions simply lie outside the scope of scientific investigation - science (at least for the time being - things will get interesting when we are better able to model the brain) cannot determine answers to a great many philosophical questions for one, and, perhaps more controversially, there are questions where the number of factors involved simply make make scientific investigation either impractical or irrelevant - for example, determining whether agile actually makes a difference to dev team performance, or whether one language is more productive than another (and I know we'd all like the answer to that one :-).
It is very hard to control for the vast number of factors in a human endeavour - I am certain this is something not simply limited to computing but in fact applicable to many engineering disciplines.
In summary - though anecdote is scientifically useless, it is sometimes all we have to go on to make a decision. Just don't talk about it like it's scientific.
Advice like "perhaps you could consider spending your money to live closer to work" doesn't require citation. Nor does "self-promotion works". I go to my peers and family and ask for advice on problems and decisions and I'm not looking for citations but their advice best on their life experience. In no way am I diminishing this.
However, A cheap chair and mattress may end up costing you 10-20x in doctor's bills. is purporting fact. It looks to the casual observer that this is backed by some study. Using numbers implies something has been measured. Yet there is no citation. This 'fact' may be read, repeated, regurgitated and enter in to folklore, when in fact likely this is someone just proffering their opinion.
This is actually harmful and just encourages the kind of "common sense or wisdom" that the original question was trying to avoid.
We are most definitely agreed on that point :-)
First nice =! expensive. It's a subjective term meant to allow you to find your own definition. The whole point is one you seem to be in need of (don't focus on "specs" or "definitives" and just find a bed and bedding that you love. If it is more expensive then it's money well spent.)
Re: farmer v doctor- again you're focusing on the "detail" of the advice and while totally missing the point. The point of that advice is that prevention (whatever you personally define as such) and taking care of your long-term health is a far better option than waiting until something breaks.
You seem to want this advice to offer the exact recipe for a better life. You expect it to contain the scientifically proven facts. Unfortunately that's not how good advice works. Good advice gives you perspective while leaving the details up to you.
<mild_snark>
Finally most of the advice deals with this thing called "joy". you'll find that scientifically speaking there is no agreed upon universally measurable "joy" metric. In lieu of science I recommend creating your own totally subjective definition of joy and applying it to as much of your life as possible. I have no facts to give you as to why this improves your life so you're going to have to trust me... But it does. Vastly.
</mild_snark>
And that is the big picture that each piece of advice is offering you.
The words 'cheap' and 'expensive' appeared 6 times in the article. I guess cheap can be used metaphorically but generally they are used to describe specifically the cost of the item. So I'm really not clear what point you are making. At no point did I confuse the concepts of 'nice' and 'expensive'.
"The point of that advice is that prevention [...] and taking care of your long-term health is a far better option than waiting until something breaks."
No, the point made was that prevention is orders of magnitude cheaper. It's you that seems to be confusing cost with a more subjective 'better'.
As for your mild_snark remark, all I can say is you've clearly not read my comments in this thread.
The topic of the question was:
"life lessons [that] are unintuitive or go against common sense or wisdom"
'prevention is better than waiting until something breaks', 'spend money on a good bed', are these really unintuitive? Do they go against common-sense?
As a hypothetical example, I would consider a good response to this question would be a well-cited example of how in fact a really cheap bed made out cardboard in fact gave the best nights sleep, or how actually it's a lot cheaper to ignore diet and deal with it later.
My experience is that it's not about the cost of an individual chair, or mattress, or desk, or whatever. It's about the cost of the process. The ideal mattress for you, today, might only cost a few hundred bucks, but you may have to put half a dozen of those cheap mattresses to the test to find it. And then your needs might change, because people grow older, and you'll need a different cheap mattress.
Your needs are going to change from day to day or from year to year. So what you want from furniture that's built to last is: Adjustability (you can change the height, the tension, or the angle without sacrificing structural soundness or necessary rigidity) and/or flexibility (the furniture is suitable for a wide range of postures and uses; a classic example is memory foam, which slowly adjusts itself to you). Not to mention: Portability and resale value, because you'll be auditioning a lot of stuff.
Consider desks, for example. At any given moment in my life, including this one, I could take my computer desk and replace it with a strategically stacked pile of cheap cardboard boxes. And, indeed, when I get a crazy new idea for a room arrangement (standing desks!) I tend to prototype it with cardboard boxes. But: The cardboard boxes are risky; they tend to fall apart over time, or fail very suddenly at moments of high stress. They also have poor structural characteristics; typing on a platform built out of cardboard, for example, can be quite unsatisfying, because it is squishy. And most importantly, the cardboard boxes don't adjust well at all. To change the height or position of my monitor or keyboard I have to find other boxes, or take everything apart and restack. Ergonomics is a game of inches. The ability to easily adjust something by an inch one way or the other is very valuable, and you are going to pay for that, either by buying something adjustable, or by auditioning two or three versions of everything, or by spending a lot of time jury-rigging things.
A lot of people have tells too, default motions you do when you are not comfortable. I am trying to unprogram mine.
I wasn't stating that there was not scientific basis behind the study of body language; only that if you are going to claim it, I would like to see it backed up with some science.
---
However if you like to discuss the specifics I think it's a very interesting topic. Certainly there are some cues that can be garnered from the study of body language, although from everything I've read the role it can play is over-stated.
Interesting choice of examples: I'm a professional poker player and the role of live 'tells' is generally assumed by non-player playing populace to be much more important than reality[1]. Everything I've read recently about criminal profiling has thrown it in to a negative light and questioned it's validity[2].
A lot of NLP has entered in to 'commonly held beliefs' or is now considered 'intuitive'. When someone is lying they look to the left to access the right hemisphere; this type of hand shake implies dominance; all that jazz. This stuff is easy to test clinically and there is just not the evidence in support[3]. As you brought up eye movement, one study sourced in the Wikipedia article shown no evidence of "a person's preferred sensory mode of thinking can be revealed by observing eye movement cues"
This stuff is very easy to believe and is certainly 'intuitive'. But to my knowledge it has no scientific basis; but I'm certainly interested to read anything that shows otherwise.
1. http://www.pokerpages.com/articles/archives/negreanu30.htm
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/15/criminal-profiling-... one article I read recently.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming#Cr...
It's very frustrating to deal with people who apply NLP or lay-CBT on a regular basis. Especially when you are trying to have a rational conversation and they are wasting time trying to "learn about sub-modalities" or apply auditory anchors to things like acceptance or rejectance.
One person I work with occasionally very clearly thinks of himself as talented in mind control by applying these things. However, from the outside it's very apparent that they have simply poisoned his perspective to make him believe he is being successful.
In short, I wish people would stop wasting time propagating pseudoscience.
I am not defending extremes like NLP or the far out profiling where you try to get in the mind of someone. By profiling - maybe I mislabelled it - I mean basic stuff that every police officer is trained to look for as indicators of nervousness or over defensiveness (indicators but not conclusive proof - a person might just be easily jarred). Certainly bluffing and reading tells are overstated but that does not mean they are useless and can't be used to a good level by expert players (as an aside making a bot that plays good poker is my hobby so I agree on the power of finding patterns in data as key and those who use holdem manager can also attest). Also by tells I mean little things that your mother or S.O. will know about you when you are thinking, nervous, excited etc.
Consider, if someone you know is yelling with an angry tone can you tell if they are pretending to be angry or are really angry with good confidence? The same sentence read differently can have a world of difference. When you see someone can you have a good idea if they are confident? Stuff like downward gaze, slouched shoulders, shaky voice are the signals I speak of, any one of which may not be useful but taken together push you firmly into a certain distribution. You control this and you can have an influence on how people perceive you. No need to seek to NLP nonsense.
What it does do though, is it feels like a luxury good.
It is this mental thing/process of giving yourself a treat, or treating yourself like 'royalty' that gives you a little boost. And it didn't cost all that much either.
Similarly, with the last pairs of jeans that I bought, I paid to have the length adjusted. Previously I'd just rolled up the cuffs(?) and they get a bit daggy. Despite the adjustment costing almost as much as the jeans did, my guilty secret is that I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from looking down and seeing perfect length jeans.
Treat yourself, you're worth it, and nobody else will do it for you...
Thread count is much less important than the quality of the cotton/fiber and the quality of the weaving. Even shops that sell sheets admit to this, saying that thread count is a metric, but is primarily a marketing tool.
More: http://www.lonegunman.co.uk/2010/01/22/buying-linen-thread-c...
You're right: the research shows that a 35 hour workweek is ideal for knowledge workers. This has been repeatedly confirmed in various studies. See PeopleWare or Slack, both by DeMarco.
Relevant StackOverflow thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1600071/are-there-any-ser...
> > Spoken communication has a massive non-verbal component. Study body language and you'll be pretty shocked at how often peoples' spoken words contradict their telltale non-verbal cues.
> Citation please. A lot of the 'non-verbal communication' stuff (read: NLP) is considered unscientific gumf.
Objecting to this is simply inane. NLP may be bunk, but if you truly believe that what people mean === what they say, I feel sorry for you.
You've completely misunderstood what I said. I don't know how to begin to respond as it has no bearing whatsoever to what I wrote.
I guess you will have to continue to feel sorry for me.
I gave you some citations for your other question. I'll assume you meant to thank me for clarifying the matter and just forgot.
- I was making absolutely no comment about whether something is true or not.
- I'm not saying that what was written was incorrect. And I'm not saying "this is true but trivial". Again, I'm making absolutely zero comment about whether what was said was accurate.
- My point was, if you are going to answer a question asking for advice that's 'un-intuitive or not common knowledge', making over-simplified, bland recommendations on certain subjects without citation does not answer the question and actually makes things worse.
- When I said things like "where's the citation?", I wasn't actually asking for HN posters to respond to back it up. I'm not strongly opposed to, say, the reading of body language. (although it's certainly interesting to go off on a tangent and discuss some specific points - I've commented on this topic below in the discussion).
- Instead I was using a rhetorical device to demonstrate that the lack of clarification and citation just further spreads unscientific 'intuitive' folklore.
That people are actually providing citations to something and supporting a point actually supports my argument, do you see?
If you now take this understanding and re-read your first response, you can see the whole "well I feel sorry for you" thing just doesn't jive at at all to this sub-thread of discussion.
Story of my marriage. Some folks just have very incompatible communication styles. At such times, more clarification often just muddies the water more. I hope that is not the case here.
Peace.
I find this a bad advice due to many different reasons. First and foremost, startups must have high expectations in order to, well, start up. People would never, ever create a company assuming it would go straight to hell after six months.
What also bothers me with this statement is that, by keeping expectations low, you would probably not work as much as you would if you had higher expectations.
As a final note, I have always kept my expectations very, very high. I always aim for A's at university. Yet, I do not feel less happy than the average Joe, even though I sometimes get a B or a C.
Speaking of goals, you're confusing them with expectations. Having high goals and low expectations is generally the most potent mix to ensure that you're working hard. If you're working hard for an exam, but expect you'll only get a B, getting that A makes you happy. If you instead expect the A, and only get a B, you'll be unhappy and discouraged. We all know about that one star student who cried because they got "only a B".
by keeping expectations low, you would probably not work as much as you would if you had higher expectations.
I think the opposite is true-- there are many startups that have failed because they expected the traffic to be there when they launched, because they expected the world to sit up and take notice, instead of realizing that there was a lot of hard work they had to do to get it. Lower expectations, in this case, leads to harder work (and a higher likelihood of success.)
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In the past year or two, I have learned my greatest life lesson. As a lifelong high achiever, it was extremely counter-intuitive yet it was right in front of me all along. First, a little background...
In the past couple of years:
Sure we all have great memories and are busy working at building even better futures, but ultimately it all boils down to:All we have is now.
My pets have been trying to teach me this for years, if only I had listened. And now my mother is teaching me. They don't really remember yesterday. They don't care about tomorrow. But they really care about the moment. Intensely.
I have had to really slow down and let this sink in. When I visit my mother in her nursing home, we have a great time laughing, talking, visiting others, and of course, playing Jeopardy. We can't have the conversations we used to, so we just have new experiences, one time only, in the moment, and only for those who are there. We never talk about the past and she simply doesn't understand, "I'll see you tomorrow."
I haven't stopped building my future, but I no longer sacrifice the present in order to get there. I have learned that the process must be as enjoyable as the outcome. After all, the process is "now" and the outcome is just an instant in time.
It may sound cliche, but everyone should take inventory of all the good stuff in their lives (especially other people) and make the most of it now. You'll be surprised how quickly it'll be gone. Don't wait half your life to learn my most valuable counter-intuitive lesson.
Bingo.
If I had to like or upvote only one thing today, anywhere, I would upvote this. I seriously wish I could upvote it twice.
Thank you for reminding me.
We have now, certainly, and now is amazing. But we have the past, too; at least for a while (dementia and all sorts of other things can rob us of the past). We have the future, too (though we can be robbed of that).
I live for all three. The past is where I draw from to inform my present actions; the present is where I enjoy myself and prepare for the future; the future is where we're all heading.
If I lived for the now, I wouldn't be going to college. I wouldn't be planning to study for a PhD in Neuroscience and researching assistive brain/spine implants. I wouldn't study programming languages and designs. I wouldn't be reading The Intelligent Investor. In fact, if you lived for the now, you'd probably be living in a soma-induced haze à la Huxley's Brave New World: it'd be the optimal choice, in fact. Pure neurochemical bliss.
The argument that you should live for now because you could be dead at any second is obscene, to me: it's more likely that you live than you die, and you're likely to be consistently happier now and in the future if you act like you'll be alive in the future. Evidence: planning for retirement. Seriously.
So live for yourself, sure, but live for all of yourself. Think of yourself as a smudge on a timeline: not in one place, not just in the past, not just in the future. Optimize the smudge.
-Mahatma Gandhi
What stands out as a key difference between the happy and the unhappy is the belief that good, interesting, exiting things are ahead. Hell, more than half the fun of a vacation is the expectation of the fun you're going to have. (See also: certain beliefs in an afterlife.)
It pains me, as I get older, to see some of my friends and family shift from being upbeat and energetic, folks who made plans for the future, to dour and nostalgic, as if everything good that might ever happen to them has already passed.
Fuck that. Never stop.
This is what I've seen, too. Today's great, but tomorrow always can be better. I live every day, and I want to live for the rest of them.
Yes, we have past, present, and future. But you can't change past: it's gone so in the end it's not much to live for. You can't live for future either: you can just project now into something you think would be a good future. Thus, even planning for future happens now. It is now when anything happens and where any choices are made. Past and future are important and useful, but they only exist as concepts in your mind. You can't live future or past and while trying to do so can be soothing it will never get you anywhere.
In my humble opinion, it is foolish to underestimate the special position of now.
You live all of the future and the past. They all happen. You're mostly arguing semantics about the future, and you're ignoring the past almost entirely. My reasons for their importance stand, unaddressed.
Rather, I think the word he was going for (correct me if I'm wrong) was "in." I.e. "Live in the present moment." Don't live in the past, don't live in the future, etc...
And that to truly live in the present moment, you have to take the wisdom of the past, and consider the weight your actions will hold in the future, but ultimately all you have is now. So I don't think what you said goes against what the OP said, it just highlights a different aspect. The past was lived, the future will be lived, but your decisions will be most important when they happen. You're not living if you're stuck in the past or displacing the present for some hazy future (a young investment banker working 100 hours a week for...).
Also, there are "present" qualities in all the examples you gave. Assistive brain/spine implants improves the present moment living conditions of other humans. We can use programming and the skills we have to build tools that help people better live their lives.
Also, things like love and other people are strongest in the present moment. Ultimately we likely invest and we study because so that we can make ourselves happy or search outside of ourselves, but a lot of times it's a lot closer (both physically and temporally) than we might think.
Living for the now doesn't mean being a dopamine junkie.
I went to college knowing that it was basically useless for what I wanted to do with my life. I went because it was time - all the adults around me said that I'd be missing out on an awesome experience if I didn't, and while I was a little skeptical, I figured I'd give it a try. That, and the economy was about to enter the shitter (it was 2001), and the company I was working at was about to lay off 40% of its workforce.
I majored in physics because I liked the feeling of sitting out on my roof with sunshine on my face (yeah, New England, it didn't last very long), textbook in my lap, working on really hard math problems. As it turned out, I didn't like it enough to stick with it. I then majored in computer science because I had found out that I liked it enough to spend my weekends working on compilers and my late nights reading up on programming language design. At the time I did those, I was a physics major, and they were completely irrelevant to anything that might possibly advance my degree or career. But they were fun.
I read The Intelligent Investor because I'd just started working at a financial software startup, had an hour long commute, and figured it might be more fun to figure out what I'd just gotten myself into rather than stare at the silent faces on the train. As it turned out, after reading The Intelligent Investor I didn't much like what I'd gotten myself into at all, which is why I'm not in finance now.
In one of Paul Graham's essays, he says that you can tell an adult from a child because an adult will tend to "lean into" challenges, accepting them as part of who they are instead of shrinking back from them. There's nothing that prevents you from building the habit of leaning into challenges into your daily identity. It doesn't particularly matter what those challenges are, it matters that you attack them. If you build this habit, you'll usually do fairly well even if you don't make a master plan for your life. Heck, you'll probably do better than people who do create a master plan, because life has a way of biting you in the ass and tearing your plans to shreds.
The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge. Someone who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance. If an adult says "that's a stupid idea," a kid will either crawl away with his tail between his legs, or rebel. But rebelling presumes inferiority as much as submission. The adult response to "that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in the eye and say "Really? Why do you think so?"
Since dopamine is for desire, you probably meant opioid, which is for pleasure.
As logic stands you couldn't meet a man who's from the future
But logic broke as he appeared he spoke about the Future
"We're not gonna make it"
He explained how the end will come
you and me were never meant to be part of the future
All we have is now
All we've ever had was now
All we have is now
All we'll ever have is now
I noticed that he had a watch in hand that looked familiar
He was me - from a dimension torn free of the future
"We're not gonna make it"
He explained how the end will come
You and me were never meant to be part of the future
All we have is now
All we've ever had was now
All we have is now
All we'll ever have is now
All we have is now
- The Flaming Lips
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aacl6KCaCmE
Desperation puts you at a disadvantage when you're looking for a mate or a job. People who can fake disinterest have the advantage over those with genuine neediness.
Yet, I would think that honesty and sincerity are key attributes of mates and employees.
Class A (Effort correlates with results) = Work, school, etc.
Class B (Ease correlates with results) = Socializing, dating, etc.
What I really want is more time every day to spend with her AND get work done.
There's an awful lot of crap that modern parents buy for their babies that's actually totally irrelevant to what the baby needs to do well (plus it's crazy expensive -- there's a massive "baby tax" -- where everything for babies is extra pricey unless you buy cheap-o brand -- that's kinda like the "wedding tax"). But babies don't need their own rooms, furniture, etc. etc. etc. -- they really couldn't care less about having all of this stuff of their own. They want their parents, and they want to do what their parents do.
But their parents are busy working harder so they can pay for the furniture, fancy "genius baby" toys, and fake baby versions of all of the things adults use, when the kid is just dying to use the things the parents already have, and interact with the parents themselves in surprisingly sophisticated ways (if the parents let it happen, that is).
Don't even get me started on baby food (hint: eat healthy, breastfeed, and when the kid starts wanting solid foods just leave out the salt and amazingly they pick up on how to chew right away!).
Having a kid isn't expensive at all -- monetarily -- unless you get suckered by the industry. (Note: Unless you need to pay serious money for schooling; then it will be very expensive further down the line...).
But in terms of time... well, everything changes. We're doing better & better at integrating her into our lives (rather than "now I'm watching the baby so everything else stops), but I'm a developer. There's no good way to involve a 2-year-old in writing code, so while the laundry may be done and the dishes washed, I tend to work a lot at night.....
Corollary: Be particularly wary of medical "experts".
Second, and self-referential, corollary: Be particularly wary of "bitter" people and comments.
There's a life lesson there somewhere.
Instead people produce long-winded all-encompassing content-duplicating posts, so we end up with a jumbled mess of data.
Generally, in most companies you have as much authority as you dare. The best way to get promoted is to just start doing the job you want to have and then have your title changed later. The idea that the organization and leadership of a company flows in exactly the manner the org chart specifies is a complete and utter fallacy. In reality, in most companies there is a lot of leadership coming from unexpected places, especially at a tech. company. If you sit back and wait for authority to be given to you that'll almost never happen, if you start spearheading worthwhile initiatives and start being an advocate for useful change, you'll get that authority in practice before you get it officially.
How do I know? At my current company, the IT department currently has no formal boss. So a few ambitious people decided they'd rather not do the boring programming work, and take advantage of the void. But they don't feel like being called to task. The current climate is far from ideal, and there's a lot of backstabbing going on, and if you feel responsible (for maintaining the invisible legacy systems for example), you lose to the ambitious guys.
On the plus side, I'm learning a lot about social dynamics :) . I've given up on advancing here, but the experience will be useful.
But some guy named Richard Henry --- Quora Admin --- deleted it. Said it wasn't a summary and was not useful.
Here it is, if you're interested in the summary: http://prezi.com/l1wuvbaya37o/quora-life-lessons/